Thursday, January 19, 2017

President Buhari, Dialogue Matters

By Paul Onomuakpokpo

With an air
of imperial finality, President Muhammadu Buhari has ruled out the possibility
of holding a dialogue on how to resolve the crises in the Niger Delta. From
initially pretending to support a dialogue with the leaders of the region,
Buhari has moved to declaring that there are no credible leaders to talk with
in the region and now finally that a dialogue is not even necessary. He says
the problems of the region are already known.

The position of the
president which was articulated by Vice President Yemi Osinbajo during his
visit to the Niger Delta seems to be only about the oil-rich region. But it
actually reflects the stance of Buhari concerning the whole country. Buhari
does not want any dialogue; all he wants is for the citizens to be quiet, wait
patiently as he hands them a roadmap for the development of the country. But
this approach of Buhari is not acceptable to the citizens simply because he
cannot be trusted to take the right decisions on their behalf. Any roadmap for
development that Buhari contemplates can only be tilted to suit his askew sense
of development and equity.

As regards the Niger
Delta, Buhari can only end up like his predecessors whose sense of development
without the input of the people from the Niger Delta has paved the way for the
gleeful allocation of oil blocks to people from other parts of the country
while the indigenes of the region are neglected. Past governments were aware of
the despoliation that has resulted from oil exploration in the region, yet they
failed to take any significant step to address the situation. From Isaac Boro
to Ken Saro Wiwa, the agitations by the people of the Niger Delta for
development of their oil-ravaged region have often been met with brutal
responses.

Or can the
people really trust the president when he has failed to begin the process of
the development of the Niger Delta almost two years after he came into office?
And now it was not even the president, but his deputy, who went to the region
after so much prodding. If the president were really sincere, he should have
gone to the Niger Delta himself to understand the urgency of looking for
solutions to the problems of the region. And he should have done this earlier.
Rather, he has been preoccupied with how to crush agitators in the region. There
is a good reason to suspect that what Buhari is doing is just verbal
pacification to secure a peaceful environment for him to get more oil to run
his government. With the history of Buhari’s lackluster responses to injustices
in different parts of the country, the people of the Niger Delta have good
reasons to be skeptical about his avowed developmental roadmap for the region.
These responses have perpetually diminished our humanity, collective and
individual, and thus we are obliged to be eternally vigilant in accepting his
promises.

The alarm is clear in
Buhari’s growing penchant for squelching opposition by negating adherence to
constitutionality that is the veritable cornerstone of our collectiveness. This
proclivity is unceasing because Buhari believes he can ever go unchallenged.
Two years into his four-year administration he has persistently disdained the
warning that this style that does not tolerate the position of the oppressed is
a recipe for anarchy.

Instead of genuinely
seeking ways to respond to the agitations in the South East, Buhari has since
kept the leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), Nnamdi Kanu, in
detention. And from prolonged illegal detention, Buhari has decided to subject
Kanu to a secret trial. Only Buhari and his supporters can be deluded with the
notion that the rest of the citizens see the possibility of a fair trial for
Kanu in secret. Buhari himself has expressed a lack of confidence in the
judicial system. And this is even when there are open trials. If he is outraged
at the perversion of justice in an open trial, it becomes clear to the citizens
that the orchestration of a secret trial is only a means of manipulating the
judicial system to declare Kanu culpable. And since Buhari has chosen a secret
trial, he might as well keep the verdict of guilt it would pass on Kanu to
himself.

The
conditions that gave rise to the emergence of Kanu are still in the society.
Prosecuting and finding Kanu guilty would not stop a replication of Kanu. It is
only Kanu who would be consigned to prison who may be silenced. The tragic
irony is that his imprisonment would rather serve as an inspiration to many
others who would like to be counted with Kanu as the heroes of the struggle for
the realisation of the dream of the state of Biafra.
After all, his incarceration under the pretext of prosecuting him has not
stopped the supporters of IPOB and MASSOB from protesting in the South East.

The people of the
Niger Delta cannot trust Buhari to think of their well-being when he has failed
to obey court rulings that his security operatives should allow former National
Security Adviser Sambo Dasuki to be released from detention to face his
prosecution. Instead, Buhari has kept Dasuki in detention for over year. Even
Buhari has ignored a ruling of the ECOWAS
Court that Dasuki should be released from
detention. To be sure, Dasuki should be prosecuted for his alleged
misappropriation of $2.1 billion meant to procure weapons with which to fight
Boko Haram. This malfeasance claimed the lives of not only soldiers who were
sent to the battlefield not adequately equipped but also the lives of civilians
and their property. But such a prosecution must be within the bounds of the
laws of the land. It is the same way that Buhari has consigned the leader of
the Islamic Movement of Nigeria (IMN) Ibraheem El-Zakzaky and his wife to
detention despite the rulings of courts to release him. Not even a 45-day
deadline by a high court has made Buhari to release El-Zazaky. The futility of
Buhari’s thinking for the nation was also manifested in his silence as killings
continued in southern Kaduna.

What the Niger Delta
requires is a clear template with different stages for development. Instead of
wasting the nation’s time on the symptoms of a warped system, Buhari should be
concerned with how to uproot the conditions that have given rise to them. To do
this, all the citizens must reach a consensus on the terms of mutual
co-existence. We must all be seen and treated as equal. No other part of the
country must be treated as inferior to another. And since Buhari has chosen to
disdain the national conference report which has charted a path out of many of
the nation’s crises, he is free to propose other ways of resolving them. It is
high time he overcame the delusion that there can be peace and development in
any part of the country without a sincere dialogue for the well-being of all
the citizens.